


Début Verte

by QuickLikeLight



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Allison-centric, Alternate Universe, Character Study, F/F, Harvest Moon - Freeform, Harvest Wolf, Redemption, Sexual Content, Song Lyrics, Vintner!Allison, Winemaking, You don't have to know the game to be able to read the story!, farming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-07
Updated: 2015-08-07
Packaged: 2018-04-13 09:40:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4517004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuickLikeLight/pseuds/QuickLikeLight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“How dare you?” Kate had asked her, and it plays in her mind still as she turns the soil, burying the ashes. “How could you?”</p><p>Sometimes a thing has to be destroyed to be well again. The sickness in the grapes, in their own hearts, told her all she needed to know about that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Début Verte

**Author's Note:**

> This is part of a [Teen Wolf / Harvest Moon Alternate Universe](http://quicklikelight.tumblr.com/tagged/hm-tw-au/chrono) which won't officially get off the ground for a couple of months yet, but I was inspired by a side-pairing storyline and figured I'd run with it. 
> 
> If you've never played Harvest Moon, don't worry. The story should still make complete sense to you. If you have played, however, this story is an alteration of Karen's storyline in Harvest Moon 64. Warning: It is implied that Talia Hale was accidentally killed in the fire that Kate started (unlike in TW canon, that was not Kate's intention), but Kate shows no remorse.
> 
> The lyrics are from Hozier's [Work Song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH7bjV0Q_44), which inspired the story.

> _Boys workin' on empty_
> 
> _Is that the kinda way to face the burning heat?_
> 
> _I just think about my baby_
> 
> _I'm so full of love I could barely eat_

 

Allison drags a hand through her hair, swiping sweat and dirt through it carelessly. Her fingers blister and ache, calluses worn rough on the skin breaking open and sloughing off against the handle of her shovel. Still, she digs. It’s a hard grind, turning the soil, getting it tilled for the planting, but she pushes through the pain, through the ache. The vines, the new ones she’s raised from seeds herself, little seedlings in her greenhouse, they’ll be better than the ones she cut down before.

All the Argent seedlings are better than what came before.

She works through the day, hard and long, stealing drinks of water mixed with wine to spur her on. The skin at her hip was full in the morning, but by the time the sun is high in the sky it’s empty, a few sad drops pouring out on her tongue. She shakes it to be sure, and it reminds her of the way her mother had poured the last of the old vintage into a glass, sighed and shook the bottle, asking, “Why are our grapes no longer sweet?” As if anyone in the room could answer her.

Allison works on without filling it again, ignoring the protests of her body. Her hands crack and bleed without her notice, staining the ground, the tools she holds. Her feet stumble. The rough boots she wears belong to the long gone farmhand, not to her. Her own boots, shiny and new with tall heels and silken laces, sit inside the house where they are the most useful. Out here, everything is rough and old, covered with soil and the scent of coming rain. It is at once the oldest thing she knows, and desperately new. The land is mostly empty, no sign of her traditionalist mother barking orders at tired fieldworkers, of her weak-willed father patrolling the rows, brow furrowed at the vines. That’s new, too. They all went away with the grapes, after she burned the fields.

She still feels Kate’s hands still gripping her shoulders, hears her ranting, deranged, as she pushes Allison against the wall of the shed over and over in her mind. Feels the sting of the slap, hears the muffled shouting in the distance, smells smoke and salt and the acid of burning grapes, much too sour for wine.

“How dare you?” Kate had asked her, and it plays in her mind still as she turns the soil, burying the ashes. “How could you?”

Sometimes a thing has to be destroyed to be well again. The sickness in the grapes, in their own hearts, told her all she needed to know about that.

 

> _There's nothing sweeter than my baby_
> 
> _I'd never want once from the cherry tree_
> 
> _Cause my baby's sweet as can be_
> 
> _She'd give me toothaches just from kissin' me_

 

“Allison?” she hears, and notices the sun is in the wrong spot to be setting, so it must be rising. Blood and dirt cakes her hands, all she can smell as she pulls soil over another set of roots, pats it down with love and works the vine up through the trellis. The watering can is heavier than it looks, but she lifts it, arms shaking, to pour once more.

“Allison, I’ve brought you breakfast. Where are you? Come have tea with me before I have to leave.”

She’s dizzy as she looks around, sight black around the edges. She is far from the house, out among the vines. Everything is brilliant, green and brown and yellow, the colors of new life, and behind it the sun rises with brilliant splashes of red, orange, and blue.

Now the sky is afire too.

“Allison, what have you - have you done this all alone? Allison please -”

The blackness fades in fast, but not fast enough to obscure brilliant orange hair, pale pink skin, bright red lips, like a little sunrise of her own. The soil seems soft when she hits it.

 

> _Boys, when my baby found me_
> 
> _I was three days on a drunken sin_
> 
> _I woke with her walls around me_
> 
> _Nothin' in her room but an empty crib_

 

She dreams in color. The inky blackness of the night she stole out into the vines, matches in her pockets and a can of accelerant in her hands.

 _You should have seen it go up, **whoosh**_ , Kate said, laughing.

 _That was their home_. Scott looked aghast, finding out his new piece of paradise housed such creatures. Allison wished she was just finding out. _You burned down their home over… over a contest? Because someone thought their wine tasted better than yours?_

 _No Hale vines could ever compete with ours_. Kate tossed back another glass of the sour wine, too acidic to drink without bread, too poor to serve at a meal. _Even now, Silver Label is the most superior in the region. Talia should have known there’d be retribution._

 _People were hurt,_ Scott said, pushing back from the table. _Someone_ died. _Because of your family pride in something that might as well be poison now._

 _Why shouldn’t they?_ Kate laughed and laughed, always laughing, as she threw the empty bottle at Scott’s head. Why shouldn’t they?

She dreams in the heat of the flames, still bright and burning against her cheeks. Accelerant doused her shoes, leaving them shiny and too hot, so she dragged her toes against the ground. She started in the back, pouring out destruction far away from the house. She didn’t want to be Kate. She wanted to make it right.

Long before she lit the matches, she knew the damage had been done.

She dreams in the smell of the earth in her hands as she dug, searching, trying to find the packet of seeds she’d buried behind the house. The scent of grass and fresh rain cleared the smoke from her nose as she approached the pool, threw the seeds in along with a handful of soil and ash, and a bottle of the old vintage.

 _Please_ , she’d begged. _Please, help me make this right._

She dreams in something soft and sweet, warm and gentle. Hands soothing her wounds, wiping her skin clean of the soil. She dreams the scent of wildflowers and the sound of lullabies.

She dreams in color. The brilliant red of roses, of Hale strawberries, and her lover’s lips.

 

> _And I was burnin' up a fever_
> 
> _I didn't care much how long I lived_
> 
> _But I swear I thought I dreamed her_
> 
> _She never asked me once about the wrong I did_

 

“Is she with us?” The voice is familiar, soft, like if he speaks too loud she’ll spook.

“I’m awake.” Her voice drags like a rake through the topsoil, rough in her throat.

“Here,” Lydia presses a cup into her hands, full of cool water from the well. “Drink it. You’ve been out for days already and I don’t need you fainting again.”

“Why did you do it?” he asks, staring out the window at the razed fields, the half-hearted trellises she’d built by hand while waiting for her seeds to sprout, the packet she found on her doorstep after her family left her here alone.

“Why shouldn’t I?” she asks, drinking deep and settling in. She’s exhausted, a combination of the soreness of having planted the entire field herself and the fever that followed, but Lydia still looks at her with all that precious light in her eyes.

“You should have asked for help,” Lydia says simply. “We would both have helped you.”

She knows that. She also knows she never could have asked. Kate did this evil alone; Allison alone has to atone for it.

“You’re sweet,” she acknowledges, holding out her cup with a bandaged hand for more water. Scott pours, hands steady and gentle. “Both of you.”

“How will you manage the vineyard alone?” he asks, face scrunched with worry. He’s adorable. She recognizes that in a different world, another life, it would be him that she clung to as everything fell apart. As it is, though…

“She won’t,” Lydia says, prim as can be for all her force. “I’ve told Mother already. I’m going to stay.”

“Lydia, you -” she starts to protest.

“Mother can run the shop for a long time yet,” Lydia interrupts. She pushes Allison’s hair back from her face and presses a kiss to her forehead. “I should be here with you, rebuilding this place. Restoring the Silver Label.”

“Replacing it.” The words are out of her mouth before she recognizes them “Not restoring it. We’re starting over fresh. New seeds. New vines. New name.”

“Replacing it then,” Lydia agrees.

Scott sterns his shoulders, nodding along. “I want to help. You know Stiles will want to, too. We all want to see balance brought back to Beacon Hills. What can we do?”

Together, they come up with a plan.

 

> _When I was kissin' on my baby_
> 
> _And she put her love down soft and sweet_
> 
> _In the low lamp light I was free_
> 
> _Heaven and hell were words to me_

 

The seasons pass in a flash of light, the color spectrum splayed upon the backs of her eyelids. She watches as the vines burst into flower, the fruit set budding up in brilliant green and gold, soft patches of purple among the leaves and the warm brown of the dirt underneath. She watches as Scott and Stiles move together, until gradually the space between them doesn’t seem to be space at all, but rather, a possibility that vibrates with intensity. She expects there to be a feathering by the end of the growing season, though neither she nor Lydia can figure out who’ll do the asking. Still, when they trip up the hill together, clearly just finished with their chores at the ranch or the farm, it’s easy to see how friendship has blossomed into something wilder, like the berries she finds in the forest and squeezes into sweet, tart table wine.

Together, the four of them tend the vineyard. Stiles builds trellises, ranchers’ hands easy with a hammer and wood. Scott waters the plants, talks to them gently through the early morning, spreads fertilizer on the ground for next year’s crop. Lydia pulls weeds and tends a small garden next to the house, makes sure there’s food on the table for them all whenever they drag in from a day of difficult work.

And Allison? Allison prepares for the harvest.

“It’s almost time,” Lydia says one evening, sun low in the sky as they sit on the porch. She’s tired. Her arms ache from lugging barrels, a job her dad had done, or the fieldhand, never Kate or her mother. It feels good, the pain. It keeps her human.

“A few weeks,” she agrees easily, nodding toward the plump fruit ripening already. A scarecrow wears Stiles’ old overalls and a hat Lydia found in her garden shed at home - at her mother’s home, where she no longer stays. It lords over the fields like a vintner of old, frightening away the birds and beasts alike. It doesn’t do the work that the fieldhands did, but it feels more useful to her, like a friend as she prunes and tends her apologies.

“Come inside with me,” Lydia says, and she goes easily. Their mouths fit together seamlessly, achingly fresh every time they join, as if each moment together is hard won and bursting with life. Lydia’s hands are brands on her skin, making her anew: not Argent, but Allison; not silver, but green. Warmth spreads through her body as they fall together into the bed, sheets worn and homespun underneath her but delicately scented with lilac, headboard hanging with bouquets of violets. The firm slide of Lydia’s mouth over hers elicits as intoxicating a blend as any vintner could ask for, lust and heat and want and love pouring from her body like she could decant it. Lydia’s fingers press inside her, move over all of her secret places, driving her wild with the need of it.

“There you are,” Lydia says to her in the dark as her pleasure crests and her body bows off the straw mattress. “I’ve found you. I’ve got you.”

She can’t speak, can’t offer any words in her own defense against the onslaught of desire that washes over her, but she offers her mouth in other ways, until the honey sweetness of Lydia’s want covers her nose and chin, smears against her cheeks.

“I’ve got you,” Lydia says again, over and over as her hands clench in Allison’s hair. “You’re with me. I have you.”

In the darkness, it is an easy thing to believe. It is an easy thing to want.

 

> _When, my, time comes around_
> 
> _Lay me gently in the cold dark earth_
> 
> _No grave, can hold my body down_
> 
> _I'll crawl home to her_

 

The harvest sneaks up on her even though she has been waiting for it. The window for picking the fruit is so small, two days at most to pull the fruit off the vine and gather it for destemming. She lays out buckets in the early hours of the morning, four tall stacks of them, and goes to fill one of her own. Each fruit is important, is special. She wants to kiss them all, to pop one in her mouth and taste the burst of bright, sweet juice. She doesn’t though; every grape lands gently in her bucket, until it hangs heavy off of her shoulders and neck, and she’s aching to put it down. Still, she presses on. For this to work, she needs all of the fruit off of the vines. Every drop will count.

Halfway through the day, voices rouse her from her harvesting, pulling her attention toward the house. There, she sees the man from the bakery, Isaac, and his partner Erica, talking to Lydia at the gate. They take up baskets themselves, moving toward her vines with intent. As she watches, more villagers show up: Boyd, the restaurateur; Malia, the Innkeeper’s daughter; even Kira, the quiet librarian. Each of them takes a container, dispersing through her fields at Scott’s quiet direction.

“Why are they here?” she asks, too confused to phrase it gently. Stiles takes her bucket, almost overflowing with fruit, and shuffles off in the direction of the processing shed with an exaggerated huff. Even with all of his dramatics, he is careful not to spill a single grape.

“They want to help,” Scott says, shrugging on his own gathering basket. “We all have an interest in this. Let us do what we can.”

It grates against her instincts - she needs to atone for this herself, she knows - but Lydia’s hands on her face settle her instantly.

“It isn’t your evil, Allison,” she says, an old argument worn new by time and distance. “And these aren’t Silver Label vines. Let us do what we can, for everyone’s sake. Talia would have wanted it that way.”

The words find a way into the deep soil of her self, planting themselves in the richness there and blooming without permission. She doesn’t need to search her memory to know that her love is right; Talia would respect this unity far more than her blood sacrifice. She kisses Lydia fast and fierce, almost bruising, but Lydia doesn’t flinch.

“Go,” she says, pushing at Allison’s back. “Pick your grapes you silly martyr. Come back to me when it’s through.”

They harvest together, the lot of them, for the whole of the two days. Every vine is picked clean.

 

Snow clings to her boots as she stomps inside. These aren’t an old fieldhand’s; she bought her own, after. Her old ones sit by the fireplace, shiny and new looking. They are a reminder of the Allison she was before: pretty and pointless. Her new ones suit her better.

“Finished?” Lydia asks, laying a warm kiss on her burning cold cheek. Allison holds up a bottle, green glass with a small, hand-drawn label, the words “ _Début Verte_ ” written in her own pen.

“Let’s crack it open,” Lydia grins, searching for a glass in the cupboard.

“Not this one,” Allison says, searching out her stationary. “This one is special. The first bottle.”

“We’ll deliver it together, then,” Lydia says. She takes Allison’s hand, twines their fingers together like vines wrap around the trellis, like a blood curse works itself into the soil. Like love curls around a broken hull, and life becomes possible once more.

 

> _To Derek and Cora,_
> 
> _I can never repay the debt my family owes, but that doesn’t mean I won’t try. Please accept this bottle as an offering of friendship. I hope that we can create a fresh start together._
> 
> _Sincerely,_
> 
> _Allison Martin_

 

**Author's Note:**

> Your feedback is valuable to all fic writers, and I'm no exception. If you enjoyed this story, please let me know.
> 
> Come find me on [tumblr](http://quicklikelight.tumblr.com).


End file.
